Tourism backlash grows in Spain’s Canary Islands: How it may affect your vacation

Thousands of flag-waving demonstrators hit the streets across Spain’s Canary Islands on Sunday to demand restrictions to the mass tourism they say is overwhelming their Atlantic archipelago.

Rallying under the slogan “The Canary Islands have a limit”, demonstrators began marching at midday in tourist hotspots across all of the archipelago’s seven main islands. Protesters gathered outside a convention centre in Maspalomas on the island of Gran Canaria, the only water park on the island of Fuerteventura, and the nightlife district in Playa de las America on Tenerife’s southwestern tip.

Waving white, blue and yellow flags of the Canary Islands, chanting and whistling protesters slow-marched by tourists sitting in outdoor terraces in Playa de las America before they rallied on the beach. “This beach is ours,” they chanted as tourists sitting on sunbeds under parasol shades looked on. The demonstration followed large protests held in April in town squares across the archipelago against a model of mass tourism critics say favours investors at the expense of the environment, and that prices local residents out of housing and forces them into precarious jobs.

“The tourist sector is bringing poverty, unemployment and misery to the Canary Islands,” Eugenio Reyes Naranjo, the spokesman for the Ben Magec-Ecologists in Action environmental group which has played a leading role in protests, told AFP at the rally in Gran Canaria. Holding placards reading “The Canaries are not for sale” and “Enough is enough”, demonstrators called for limits on tourist numbers, a crackdown on holiday apartments and curbs on what they describe as uncontrolled development. Around 10,000 people took part in the protests across the archipelago, with the largest rally drawing some 6,500 people in Tenerife, local official said.

‘Get nothing in return’
The islands, which lie off the northwestern coast of Africa, are known for their volcanic landscapes and year-round sunshine that make them a popular destination for northern European sunseekers. Last year a record 16.2 million people visited the Canary Islands, a 10.9 percent increase over 2022 and more than seven times its population of some 2.2 million, a level demonstrators argue is unsustainable for the archipelago’s limited resources. The islands are on track to smash this record this year.

The biggest markets for the islands are Britain and Germany, although they are also a popular destination for people from mainland Spain. Some four out of 10 residents work in tourism, which accounts for 36 percent of the islands’ gross domestic product, official figures show. But many locals complain they do not share in the wealth generated by the tourism sector which they say goes mainly to large firms from outside of the archipelago.

“The wealth generated in the archipelago goes all over Europe, the people of Gran Canaria get nothing in return. It’s foreign companies that come here, and we don’t see the money anywhere,” Adrian Souza, a 32-year-old protester at the rally in Maspalomas, told AFP.

‘So much construction’
One in three people living in the Canaries are at risk of poverty and 65 percent struggle to make ends meet, according to the latest figures from the European Anti-Poverty Network that were presented on Tuesday in the Canary’s regional parliament. Some tourists cheered the demonstrators as they went by. “The coastline is being damaged by so much construction. I totally agree with them,” said Rosalia Magalilo, a 55-year-old tourist from Switzerland who said she had been coming to Gran Canaria for 30 years.

Anti-tourism protests have multiplied in recent months across Spain, the world’s second-most visited country after France, prompting authorities to try to reconcile the interests of locals and a lucrative sector that accounts for 12.8 percent of Spain’s economy. Barcelona city hall has said it will ban all holiday apartments by 2028 while the southern city of Seville plans to cut off the water supply to properties let out to tourists without a licence.